Make sure you pack your thinking caps for this month's new releases, which give your journeys a philosophical spin – literally so in the case of pop-astronomist Fred Watson's Star-Craving Mad, which tries to answer life's biggest questions. Watson enlists the aid of some of the planet's coolest gadgets, with the results as illuminating as those endlessly rotating twinkles above us.
Asking more pressing questions is Gaia Vince, who crosses six continents in her Adventures in the Athropocene. It's a study of the Age of Man or, more accurately, how we're changing the planet and how people across the globe are coping. It's fascinating, troubling and remarkably cool-headed.
People changing their environments is also at the heart of Radical Cities, except this time it's a positive, creative response to the dangerous over-population in some areas of Latin America. From Rio to Buenos Aires, Justin McGuirk explores alternative communities and innovative architecture that offers pragmatic solutions to one of the globe's most pressing issues.
More meditative is Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust, which takes a convivial ramble around the reasons why we walk – social, political, religious, for pleasure. And like any great walk, the diversions she takes along the way are just as interesting as the end point. Great title too, obviously.
More serious is Robert Fletcher's anthropological study of ecotourism, Romancing the Wild. Fletcher forensically analyses what it is about getting active in the great outdoors that chimes with the culture of its majority attendees – white middle-class Westerners.
More personable is Sam Miller's extensive and enjoyably idiosyncratic look at how foreigners and travellers perceive India. A Strange Kind of Paradise goes on a 2,500-year journey through the confused stereotypes that people use to conveniently frame the nation – from the Ancient Greeks to the psychedelic 1960s and beyond. It's dry, funny and curiously British.
Equally unique and just as imbued with its author's homeland is Gruff Rhys's AmericanInterior. The Super Furry Animals frontman wanders the trail his ancestor, John Evans, strode across the USA over 200 years ago in a bid to find the mythological Welsh-speaking tribe, the Madogwys. The history is fascinating, but Rhys's journey – accompanied by a puppet – is one of the earthier US travelogues we've seen.
Making her own way across the USA – on a Triumph T100 – is Zoë Cano. Bonneville Go or Bust is her story of biking 10,000km of backroads during the summer of 2010. The book's best bits are the colourful local encounters.
David Le Vay's adventure is a mid-life defying hike that will take him through Italy, France and Switzerland. A Tour of Mont Blanc is a wry travelogue, but Le Vay and his buddy Rupert make for likeable companions as they shamble around ‘The White One'.
Many of the best journeys end on a bar stool, which brings us to A London Pub For Every Occasion.This book divvies up the capital's drinking holes into categories: for meeting people, for Guinness, for the cat. It's the latest from Herb Lester Associates, who've been creating stylish guides and maps since 2010 – perfect for real-ale-loving aesthetes. And with that, we're off for a beer!
